STUFF YOU GOTTA WATCH - Neve Campbell Indies

Neve Say Neve Again

The Hardest Working Canadian Woman in Show Business
Travels from Here to Obscurity

By John V. Brennan
September 2005 (with January 2007 update, "Saying Neve Again")

"Neve Campbell is amazingly cute. I have admired her in other movies, but now, in "Three to Tango" she is mired in a plot of such stupidity that there is only one thing to do, and that is to look at her... "
--- Roger Ebert

Neve People who know me well will tell you this: I got the mad love for the Neve Campbell. I'm not saying that she's the greatest actress we have, nor the most beautiful, but she is one of my favorites. There has always been something about her combination of ultra-pretty girl next door looks and herky-jerky acting style that has kept me a fan since she first burst upon the scene in 1994. But I haven't always been a fan of her movies.

That has changed in the past five years. In fact, we are currently living in a veritable Golden Age of Neve Campbell films. Okay, it's not exactly like the Golden Age of Hitchcock or Chaplin, but for some of us, it's great news.

Neve first got noticed as Julia Salinger on the TV family drama Party of Five (1994-2000), a critical favorite that did not always find the audience it deserved. She was also in the TV production The Canterville Ghost (1996) with Star Trek's Patrick Stewart, and two good theatrical films, The Craft and Scream (both 1996). Back in those heady days, Neve had more endearingly irritating acting ticks this side of Jeff Goldblum. There is still a small site out there devoted to Neve's acting style, accurately described as implementing "several defense mechanisms, including the dramatic pause, the run-on sentence that temporarily disorients viewers, and the Sideways Head Bow." Watching her emote on Party of Five, I sometimes wondered how she didn't knock over lamps with her waving hand, or get whiplash from all the quick head jerks. It's hard to say if Neve was acting or just stringing together a series of learned behaviors in long enough strands to get herself through her scenes, but whatever it was, it was fun to watch and it worked. Rewatching some of the first season recently courtesy of a DVD release, I was struck with not only how good the entire cast of then-unknowns were (Matthew Fox, Lacey Chabert and the underrated Scott Wolf), but also how perfectly Neve nailed the vulnerability of her teenaged character. Although she was to mature into a much better actress, she was already a master of showing seventeen different emotions, most of them associated with pain and confusion, in the space of seconds.

The success of The Craft and Scream led to such mainstream Hollywood stuff as Wild Things , 54 (both 1998) and Three to Tango (1999), as well as two good but pointless sequels to Scream in 1997 and 2000. In short, Neve was a movie star. But I wasn't happy (am I ever?). I was never that interested in her mainstream stuff, because since about 1993, I haven't been that interested in anybody's mainstream Hollywood stuff. I enjoyed The Craft and Scream because the combo of Neve and things that go bump in the night was just irresistible, but the rest of her stuff I could take or leave.

Then an intriguing thing happened. Having established herself as a Hollywood star, ready to play the girlfriend of Jim Carey, Adam Sandler or Ben Stiller in dozens of movies yet to come in the new millennium, Neve decided she would rather do quirky little movies nobody would ever see. First was Hairshirt (1998), also known as Too Smooth (any time a movie is know by two names, it is usually guaranteed to be unknown by either one), followed by the dark comedy Drowning Mona (2000). She returned to mainstream Hollywood with the final Scream film and then began a long run of indie and cable films: Panic, (2000), Investigating Sex (2001), Last Call (2002), Lost Junction, The Company, Blind Horizon (all 2003), When Will I Be Loved? and Churchill: The Hollywood Years (both 2004). Eight films in four years, and the average movie fan has probably only heard of The Company, which had at least some pre-release publicity and still went nowhere.

Last Call I haven't caught all of her indies (who has that kind of time?) but I have liked most that I have seen. She is sympathetic and sweet in Panic (made for theaters but released to cable - another sign of an indie destined to go nowhere), a slow-moving but involving story about a suburban family of mobsters, almost a throwback to the kind of thoughtful films routinely released in the early '70s. The superb cast also features William H. Macey, Tracy Ullman, Donald Sutherland, Barbara Bain and John Ritter. In Showtime's Last Call (also known as Fitzgerald - see note about dual titles), Neve played young Frances Kroll, assistant to author F. Scott Fitzgerald in his final days. The film turns on Iron's splendid portrayal of the doomed author, but Neve's soft, touching performance makes her the eye in the fury of Iron's hurricane performance.

Blind Horizon was a confusing mess of a thriller that tried hard to be The Manchurian Candidate, with Neve plus a good cast (Val Kilmer, Sam Shepard, Fay Dunaway) completely wasted. But she made up for it with Lost Junction, where she did her best work to date so far as Missy, a young southern belle who may or may not have killed her husband and stuffed him in the trunk of her car. Typical of an obscure film like this: in the film, Neve has auburn hair as pictured at the top of this page. On the DVD box, she is shown in long, straight black hair, in pictures obviously taken from another part of her career, quite possibly her Party of Five days. Whoever did the graphics for the DVD was just the first person in a long line of people who never saw this film.

Even The Company, her personal project about the world of dance which was directed by request by Robert Altman, impressed me, even though the only ballet I ever saw starred Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and some hunting dogs. Just the fact that she wanted Robert Altman and got him Altman to direct was enough to impress me, but the film was good, confusing, random fun too. She's not a bad dancer at all.

I couldn't make it past an hour of When Will I Be Loved?, despite the opening scene of Neve in the buff. There are some things I don't like to see in films. Number one on the list is harm coming to animals. Number two is Neve Campbell making love to The Soprano's Dominic Chianese. I'm not sure if that actually happened in the film, but everything seemed to be leading that way, and I have a weak constitution. As for Churchill: The Hollywood Years, I have no idea if it was even released. I'll bet Neve doesn't even know either.

Part of the fun of being a Neve Campbell fan is knowing that these films, because of their lack of publicity, can be had for a good price on the open market. I'm always on the lookout for all kinds of films on Ebay and in the bargain bins of video stores, and I've often stumbled over Neve DVDs at great prices. The highest price was $12.99 for a copy of The Company. My local video store put five copies on the rental shelf (the very definition of "cockeyed optimism"), yet, within two weeks, two copies were being sold off in the bargain bin. Lost Junction set me back $7.99. Last Call and Panic? 99 cents each on Ebay.

When Will I Be Loved? was available previously viewed for $14.99. I passed.

There used to be a rumor that Neve Campbell wanted to star in a movie about silent film star Louise Brooks. It sounds reasonable. Would anybody else in Hollywood think of doing this film? With the possible exception of Jennifer Jason Leigh, no. If it is made, is anybody going to see it? No. Well, that's not entire true. I will see it. And I will probably enjoy it. I'll tell you about it when it comes out, straight to DVD, with two different titles and a picture of Neve from The Canterville Ghost on the cover. - JB.

January 2007

Saying Neve Again...

Well, no Louis Brooks film, but that doesn't mean Neve hasn't been working. She just hasn't been working in anything that could be considered mainstream. Since I've written this article, Neve got engaged to actor John Light and moved to the United Kingdom, where she has done some stage work, even working again with Robert Altman.

In the meantime, I've discovered, and in one case, rediscovered, several entries into the Neve Campbell film library since I first wrote this article. The first was Reefer Madness, a cable film adaptation of the musical stage version of the classic old movie (are you following this?) about marijuana addiction. Neve's brother Christian stars, along with this generation's Sarah Michelle Gellar, Kristen Bell of TV's Veronica Mars, with Neve doing a a small bit as a malt shop waitress. An okay movie, I guess, although I can't understand satirizing something that old, when as it is, the original Reefer Madness has aged into a self-satire. Nor can I relate to the "let's make fun of 1950s conservative white middle-America" mentality. It's been done to death, mainly by people who probably used to watch Leave it to Beaver faithfully without ironic detachment. But, tangents aside, it was fun to see Neve sing and dance.

Pastiness is next to ungodliness Sad to say, the "major" Neve Campbell film of 2007 didn't even contain the fleeting pleasures of Reefer Madness. It seems that Neve has been out of action for so long, when she does try for mainstream, it still winds up going straight to DVD. The film, a Meet the Parents-like comedy (God help us), is titled Relative Strangers, and check out this cast: Ron Livingston, Danny DeVito, Kathy Bates, Bernard Hermann, Christine Baranski, Beverly D'Angelo, Bob Odenkirk, Martin Mull and Michael McKeon. Plus Neve Campbell. You might think with a cast like that, it would have half a chance of being funny, but no. I can count one time that I actually laughed (I won't spoil it for you, but it was a very simple visual gag done well). Otherwise, nothing. In the film, a touchy-feely self-help author with rich arch-conservative parents (of course), learns that he was adopted. His real parents are low-class carnival folks named Frank and Agnes Manure. Yep, that's the funniest name they could come up with. Needless to say, when they move in with him, their low-brow antics wind up threatening his career as well as his upcoming marriage to the beautiful Neve. But in the end, after many boring complications, he learns to love his biological parents as much as he loves his real parents, perhaps even more.

Give me that premise, Neve Campbell and even half of that cast, and in two weeks, I could whip up a script that may not be perfect, but would contain at least ten memorable jokes, take full advantage of the talents of Danny DeVito and Kathy Bates, and give Ron Livingston and Neve Campbell a hell of a lot more to do than just look worried and shocked all the time. There is only one groin gag and one pee gag, so I give the screenwriters credit for restraint. But having put such a limit on themselves, they revealed that their bag of comic tricks was otherwise empty.

By some evil conspiracy between the director, the cinematographer and the makeup department, Neve herself looks pasty. Not in every shot, but often enough to be noticeable. You would think that if you hired a young woman as attractive as Neve Campbell specifically to play an attractive young woman, you could at least light her in such a way so that the glare of the lights wasn't constantly shining off her cheeks and forehead.

Neve and pizza... what could be better? To round out my latest forays into Neve Campbell fanhood, I caught three different early appearances, the most interesting being a pre-Party of Five Neve in a short but amusing pizzeria appearance in a sketch on The Kids in the Hall, the excellent comedy troupe that was something like Canada's answer to Monty Python. The Kids used to get heavy play on Comedy Central, back when Comedy Central actually aired programs that were funny. I also saw the young Neve in a really, really bad and cheap Canadian horror film called The Dark, not to be confused with the more recent horror film The Dark, which may be just as bad and/or cheap for all I know. It was about a creature that lives underground. Neve played the sheriff's daughter, I think. It was all a blur, really.

Finally, while working my way through the complete Zatoichi series, obscure Kurosawa films and various westerns this past year for this site, I found time to rent the first two seasons of Party of Five just to see if the show was as good as I remembered it. It was, and Neve was a much better actress back then than I remembered her, certainly better than I describe her above. It seems that most of the acting quirks I remembered must have come later on in the series. Lo siento mucho, Neve. I'm still a fan, and I still hold out hope that someday you will be mainstream again. I'll see you at the movies - even the ones that go straight to DVD. - JB

P.S. I plan to Ebay When Will I Be Loved and Blind Horizon. Even fandom has its limits.

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